Eight things we love about photography – Ease

In his song “Some Kinda Love,” Lou Reed observes “Between thought and expression lies a lifetime.” Anyone who has ever tried to write anything more profound than “brb lol” knows exactly what he means. Careful expression of thought in words requires considerable practice, vision and revision. Just writing this brief blog post took the better part of an hour, and I’ve been practicing this for decades.

Most visual arts involve similar levels of commitment. A painting begins with sketches followed by hours of skilled application of paint to canvas. Not to mention the hours and days and weeks and months and years of classes and practice that bring you to the moment you apply the first stroke.

In photography, the distance between thought and expression is usually a fraction of a second. Post-production adjustments notwithstanding, a photo is created complete and entire the moment you press the shutter button. Using a camera doesn’t require extensive training. It requires a finger.

That’s not to say that someone new to the art can master it in an instant. Even in an age in which our tools are capable of doing a lot of thinking for us, good photographic communication requires an understanding of composition, camera mechanics and visual storytelling. However, no matter how much lining up and fiddling each shot requires, the ultimate act of creation requires no motor skills at all.

And that means anyone who can see can take a picture. The downside of such easy access is the average of more than 200,000 photos posted every minute of every day to Facebook alone, the vast majority of which are crap by professional standards. The upside is that so many people are now at least trying to express themselves visually. That’s either a democracy or an anarchy of art, depending on your point of view.

Because the creative act can be accomplished in such short order, it expands the realm of art. A young cat reclining in a shaft of sunlight might not be momentous enough to drop everything and spend hours creating a sculpture or oil painting, but he’s worth the minute required to grab a camera and press a button.

Eight things we love about photography – Silence

Now the “eight things we love” list gets personal. I have to admit that I’m a strongly visual person. I don’t hate music or conversation or any other kind of pleasant sound. But I do note an excess of noise in the world around me, from the neighbor’s leaf blower (which he uses for all purposes from leaves to snow to just generally amusing himself) to bad music escaping from nearby cars to the general love people seem to have for screaming and yelling.

Thus I treasure the silence of photographs. But I also treasure their ability to create a sense of sound without actually making any noise, taking advantage of the strong, implicit connection of our senses of sight and hearing.

I took the photo at the top of this post years and years ago. I have no memory of what the violin actually sounded like. But from the visual clues (the loose hairs on the bow, the musician’s eerie costume) I can imagine what the tune must have been like. As can you, even though you weren’t there.

Eight things we love about photography – Stillness

How often do we observe how fast life moves? And how seldom is that a compliment? Maybe I’m just getting old, but I find that I savor the moments when the world stops dashing around for a little while and slows down to the tempo of a good book or cup of hot tea.

Photos are by their nature still. They’re actually quite good at capturing motion, but even the most energetic picture still lacks actual movement or even video’s persistence-of-vision illusion of action. When you look at a photograph, what you see (in most cases) took place in a small fraction of a second. But that instant and everything that happened in it is held in place for you to examine and contemplate for as long as you want.

Eight things we love about photography – Connection

Many times I’ve been asked some variation of this question: what’s the best kind of camera? The underlying inquiry is usually about Canons and Nikons, SLRs and point-and-shoots, or even digital and film. But the best answer I can give is much simpler than that. The best camera you can ever own is the one you have with you when you see something worth photographing.

Photography is a connection to the world around you. Photos are records of your presence in a particular place at a particular time. They represent a deliberate decision to be part of life rather than living entirely inside your own head or burying yourself in email and texts. You have to go somewhere. You have to do something.

Eight things we love about photography – Moments

Comedian George Carlin used to do a bit that went something like this: there’s a moment coming. It’s in the future, but it’s going to get here. Okay, it’s closer now. Getting closer. And ... here! Ah, now it’s gone.”

Greater minds than mine have philosophized to the brink of madness about the nature of memory and impermanence. Buddhist traditions in particular assign considerable importance to living in the present moment rather than dwelling on the past or obsessing about the future.

I love photography because it records moments as they occur. Even a technically poor photo like this old shot of my cat Howie preserves the moment he went after my foot in a way my memory never could. He’s a full-grown cat now. I no longer own those shoes. The steamer trunk at the top of the shot – which we were using as a coffee table at the time – is now gathering dust in the basement.

But when I look at the photo, the memory is back in my mind. And now that you’ve looked at it, the memory is in your mind as well.

To be sure, some photographs don’t take much advantage of this. A studio shot of a bowl of plastic fruit will look the same now and ten minutes from now and ten years from now as long as you don’t change your settings or move the fruit. But far more common – at least in The Photographer’s Sketchbook – are shots that freeze a moment in time, something that never existed exactly that way before and will never exist exactly that way again.